6 ms·

It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing. It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothi

It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing. It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game

margalabargala 24d ago
A mile wide, and an inch deep
- m4rtink 24d ago
  Yeah, that is exactly my issue with the game - they crammed so many mechanics into the game, but all of them are incredibly shallow & even unfinished. The RNG space is part of the problem - planets and biomes kinda start to repeat after while and it is not really important any more on which weird planet or station you are. It is actually interesting how many games with much smaller RNG generated world maps work just fine because you don't travel so much like in NMS & kinda learn to know the landscape and also shape it yourself or with your friends. Like you know there is a lake next to you base and that deserted town, then there is that forested mountain where you got ambushed by zombies once & built a secondary mining base later, etc. In NMS you land on a random planet, build a base on it and - like, what is it good for, if there are millions of similar planets & coop multiplayer is almost non-existent.
  - goatking 24d ago
    Also the existing mechanics are overly simplified. Like space combat...
BISH-BASH-BOSH 24d ago
I was just about to say this. I have a lot of respect for the dev team but man is it so not my type of game. I wish somehow the complexity of eve could meet a game like this. I would sell a kidney for that
- darreninthenet 24d ago
  The X games?
- gavinray 24d ago
  X4?
- sfn42 24d ago
  I recently tried star citizen and it's kind of trying to be something like that but it's way too half baked with lots of game breaking bugs like you'll just lose the entire cargo of your ship which can completely bankrupt you after days of saving up. Also they keep releasing bigger and fancier pay to win ships at ridiculous price points like hundreds and even thousands of dollars instead of fixing the game. I tried it during a free week and I legitimately enjoyed it a lot but I was also extremely frustrated a lot by the bugs and the pay to win crap really rubs me the wrong way so I didn't buy it after the free trial ended. It's a weird mix of amazingly well done and absolute garbage. And pay to win. Don't forget about the pay to win bullshit.
  - shmeeed 24d ago
    I don't know about the PTW aspect. What's there to win in a broken sandbox? In my view, they mostly just keep ripping off delusional "collectors" to keep the gravy train going. It's not like these solo players then take off in their huge multi-crew ships and are able to "win" in any meaningful sense. A few years ago, I had a couple dozen hours of good fun with my starter pack just zooming around all those moons and planets, stepping out of my tiny ship and holding my breath, not knowing much about what awaits me outside - scorching heat, a blizzard, hostile or friendly players... it felt like I got my money's worth if space immersion. If you don't expect much in the way of an actual game, but are content with a few game loops held together by string and duct tape, you can find a vast and pretty universe to explore. Reeaallyyy gotta manage your expectations, though. It's very much an alpha, and you better not think it's gonna release, like, ever. Disclaimer: I have no idea how it's evolved in the past years.
    - 24d ago
actusual 24d ago
I feel the same. I want Rust in space, where there are constant stakes. NMS either takes too long to get to a part of the game where stakes become relevant, or doesn't have any. If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.
- fwip 24d ago
  EVE online?
nullbio 24d ago
Agreed. It's incredibly boring. It lacks an interesting and interactive story with good pacing. What they have done is cool, don't get me wrong, but I think they got carried away by the tech coolness without enough attention to what makes a game fun or interesting.
jimmyjazz14 24d ago
I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I have tried coming back to the game multiple times and every time I just feel bored and underwhelmed by the whole experience.
- kjs3 24d ago
  Yeah...I played it for probably a couple of hundred hours...and it wasn't that fun. In fact, it's boring. And I've come back a too many times because someone (like some of the commenters here) said "no, man...get the new update! It's a Totally Different Game!". So I jump back in, and it's different to varying degrees...and still boring. Just because there's "lots to do! new quests! rare items to find!", doesn't mean doing them is fun.
  - famahar 24d ago
    What made you play a game for a couple of hundred hours to then conclude that it is boring? I played the first release and put in roughly 100 hours. The first 90 hours were wonderful. Eventually I realized that I wasn't enjoying it as much so I put it down. But I would never call those 90 hours boring. I felt like I got a lot of value out of it, and have fond memories of discovering interesting planets. I really view NMS as an artistic experience. I don't care for the gameplay loops. I played this game like an curious explorer. There are infinite planets, many feel the same but occasionally you land on something so special that no one else has ever seen.
    - kjs3 23d ago
      What made you play a game for a couple of hundred hours to then conclude that it is boring? Because I really wanted to like it? Because it didn't get boring immediately? Because the updates kept promising to make it better? I dunno, does that justify my actions enough to satisfy you, or are my observations somehow invalid because I kept beating my head against the thing for what we apparently both agree was far too long?
      - famahar 20d ago
jasonjmcghee 24d ago
A big name in proc gen is Kate Compton who coined the term "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" to describe this phenomenon of technically unique but not different enough to matter - I googled "10000 bowls of oatmeal" to see if there was a good article and the second link was about it and nms https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowls-of-plain-oatmeal/ https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...
- meowface 24d ago
  One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity. It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.
  - nemomarx 24d ago
    You want to look at dwarf fortress talks for that, I think?
    - OkayPhysicist 24d ago
      IMO, Dwarf Fortress benefits greatly from the player seeing relatively few samples of the world gen, and the geography actually mattering to gameplay. The actual geography doesn't vary that wildly most of the time ( if you've seen one lightly forested river valley, you've seen them all), but players generate a relatively low number of worlds, and in each world probably only see a handful of sites, where dwarf-scale world gen actually matters. Unlike NMS, though, the details of world gen matter to gameplay a lot. Trade caravans and invading armies can't traverse mountain ranges and ocean, so a mountainous peninsula can be extremely isolated. At the site level, you'll probably want to design your fortress to take advantage of local geography to help fortify your fortress and provide resources, so terrain and features like rivers, volcanoes, etc. placement matters a lot. In contrast, No Man's Sky world gen feels pretty tangent to the actual gameplay. The game does a good enough job incentivizing you to explore lots of planets, but in terms of the survival/base-building aspects, there's a pretty short list of resources that matter to deciding where to setup, and geography hardly matters in terms of how you build.
deleted 24d ago
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generallee5686 24d ago
Agreed. I want to like this game _so bad_ but I think the problem is that I'm looking for a feeling of fulfilling progression when in reality this game is just a bunch of disjointed sandboxes which is certainly not my type of game.
- newsoftheday 23d ago
  Sandbox games aren't really progression games, that takes a far more refined game focus; else you'd have to have a mainframe to run it.
Avicebron 24d ago
I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse". A thought that comes to me as I type this is what if you try to co-evolve the ecosystems so it doesn't feel like it's just a mix of the same base components in different quantities.
- jackmott42 24d ago
  The best proc gen experience I have had is with minecraft modpack called hexxit. The world is procedural generated, but then there is a library of ~200+ hand built structures/features that are scattered throughout the generated terrain. So you wander through a forest and find a cave into a volcano full of diamongs but guarded by angry dwarves, then head over into the desert and find a castle with a witch king, etc etc There are enough hand built things that you don't quickly start running into repeats, and they are just melded into the generated terrain.
  - opium_tea 24d ago
    That sounds a lot like that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup approach of randomly generated floors/levels with designed "vaults" emplaced within them
  - vablings 24d ago
    This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept
    - rcxdude 24d ago
      Reminds me of bones files in nethack.
      - omoikane 24d ago
        I was going to say, NetHack doesn't feel sparse to me, but maybe I just have not played enough NetHack. I think it's due to the fact that there is a fair bit of content, but the interface drip-feeds them very slowly, combined with the difficulty of the game itself that prevents users from finding all possible ways to interact with all content.
avazhi 24d ago
How I feel as well. This game just doesn't scale well from mid game on - it's way too easy, even on permadeath + hardest difficulty. Like, making money is way too easy, combat is way too easy, everything is too forgiving. And the entire loop is centered on like, 3 things to do that are all variants of the same exact thing. Really hope they do a much better job in Light No Fire. To the guy who replied to me: Our genius overlord moderators rate limited my responses so I'll post here. > I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding You and I have very different ideas of what forgiving means. A reasonably intelligent 7 year old that enjoys and has experience playing video games could play this game on max difficulty settings and not have any issues. And while I never had an issue finding anything (shit is literally everywhere), resource scarcity doesn't equally an unforgiving game mechanic unless it's gated by some sort of difficult fight or something, which this game doesn't have. Combat is laughably easy and repetitive. I've got a couple hundred hours in the game, and at one point I was running the same bounty missions over and over again for some outrageous amount of money - the mission took 7 minutes round trip, the combat encounter was literally the exact same every time, same number of enemies just with different names. And that was the most efficient way I could make money in late game on the permadeath server on max settings. If that's the best economy loop a game can come up with, a 100% brainless combat encounter, then the developer has done something very wrong.
- micromacrofoot 24d ago
  it's because it's a sandbox farming game, it's not meant to be difficult you spend most of your time finding/farming resources and unlocking builds most of your time is traveling between planets/systems/galaxies for different resources I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding, which is the core gameplay, you can easily miss it if you don't play for 40+ hours but there are entire varieties of star systems you can't access initially, an entire race you literally can't see without completing some strings of missions, etc
mrnotcrazy 24d ago
I think this kind of game needs another innovation to make it interesting. I don't think adding more generative or LLM generated content is the solution.
ramesh31 24d ago
It's kind of like ARK, they spent so much time on all the "cool" stuff that looks great in trailers without focusing on what actually would make a game like this incredible, which is a real persistent singular world with consequences and meaningful group based PVP or PVE that works at scale. What you end up with is just a simulacra of multiplayer that basically boils down to a visually represented Xbox Live lobby.
verst 24d ago
Agreed. And this tech demo was a day 1 purchase for me back in the day. While it has gotten better since then it just doesn't hold my interest. I do like using it whenever every few months I feel inclined to get my PC VR headset out (I'm using an old HO Reverb G2 with the Oasis driver) I think it's a great VR title.
JohnMakin 24d ago
Are you sure that you've played it recently? They added an actual story, a huge quest hub, unique items, tons of stuff to do really. I'm quite overwhelmed with the amount of things to do and I don't typically enjoy sandboxes.
- jwoods19 24d ago
  I also recently came back to it and liked the story and progression system a lot more, especially on their "casual" mode.
- mortenjorck 24d ago
  I've bounced off NMS several times, but each time I come back, I reason that they've added so many systems now that the procedural generation must finally feel genuinely deep and interesting. And maybe it has, but the first 60 minutes of the game still feel like enough of a slog that I have yet to get to any of the good stuff.
  - JohnMakin 24d ago
    The first 60 minutes are definitely a slog, but once you open up access to the quest hub and get access to larger ships that function as bases, the game really opens up. I play it as a "get away" from more competitive/stressful games. The exploration of planets never really appealed to me and doesn't feel like a huge component of the game as much as maybe it did in the early days unless you're hunting for particular resource nodes.
    - noir_lord 24d ago
      Same, it's basically sci-fi Minecraft, it's just a chill game you can potter about doing whatever you want in.
- goatking 24d ago
  Not OP, but my main issue is that after visiting a few systems and a bunch of planets, you kinda saw everything the procedural generation has to offer, and visiting planets becomes boring quickly, at least for me. There are differences, and as someone mentioned there are some unique planets for sure, but for the most part they all look samey. Wildlife is also just walking/flying around doing nothing. This takes away the incentive to go and explore, which is supposed to be the main attraction to the game
jklinger410 24d ago
I feel the same way about Starfield. Just soulless projects instead of engaging video games.
- 0x457 24d ago
  Starfield is IMO worse. NMS at least has sandboxes that can entertain you and expeditions can be fun. NMS just doesn't have "goal" to work towards, so unless you can create your own goals its boring. Starfield, bugs aside, had the most boring base-building/operations I've seen in my life.
KronisLV 24d ago
You do occasionally find some pretty cool stuff. I found a barren planet in a black hole system where the vibe was all dark and shadowy with the light being tinted purple, and just some crystals or something on the surface, alongside a damaged robot that you could interact with. There was also a world that had high Sentinel activity where I founded a settlement (well, more like took over managing it), however as it turns out it’d have those gravity storms often during which you could soar through the air. There was also a world where the surface was toxic and you couldn’t stay on it for long, so I excavated a base underground, like something out of Red Faction. For what it’s worth, a lot of it can feel samey (most of the scanning) and kinda boring, but while there aren’t that many insanely huge and cinematic moments, sometimes RNG hits just right and you get something nice.
- IceDane 24d ago
  That sounds cool, but it's either a handcrafted world (if NMS has those) or pure luck. If it's the latter, then it can't have any depth. At best it can have some procedurally generated content that's going to be something you've seen before. Looks cool, but no substance.
raincole 24d ago
It more or less reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode. They were playing an asteroid shooting. > Morty: it's boring. crank up the realism slider to max > Rick: why does it get even more empty? Wait, I got it... because the universe is empty. At the end, I think there is little point in simulating the vastness of the universe in a video game (even just a fraction of it).
- latexr 24d ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1uLHmxmcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1uLHmxmcg
- estebank 24d ago
  I don't think that simulating the vastness of the universe is ever going to be fun, but approximating a theme park ride that evokes the vastness of the universe can be breathtaking, like Outer Wilds was. (The gameplay is confined to a single solar system, but it certainly makes you feel both the a sense of adventure, and the vastness of space-time.)
- trashb 24d ago
  "I have never thought to myself that realism is fun" - Gabe Newell
  - TylerE 24d ago
    True realism is often interesting though, which provides more long term engagement than fleeting shallow fun. Look at some of the hard core 3rd party addons for flight sims, for instance, which are so realistic they actually ship licensed versions of the real aircraft training manuals and checklists - because every switch and procedure works.
    - djeastm 24d ago
      It's interesting for a niche audience (and I'm one of them). But that's a small minority of gamers (and $$$).
    - 24d ago
whichdan 24d ago
I kinda feel the same way. I loved slowly going through the main story and probably put 50hr into the game, but the sandbox alone (amazing as it is) just doesn't do it for me.
RIMR 24d ago
I felt this way for a while until I decided to sit down, start a new game, and engage with it. It's a completely different game, it just doesn't look like it if you picked back up where you left off. Without the right context, you have a tendency to just repeat what you were doing before, and it feels like nothing changed. But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.
drooopy 24d ago
Exactly how I feel about this game. While its redemption arc is one for the history books, every time I come back to it, I feel nothing.
1970-01-01 24d ago
Disney found this out the hard way with Infinity. On v3.0 a large chunk of their IP was staged into a fully customizable and open universe.. and it was so unremarkable that they shutdown the servers and killed all development a few years later.
spandrew 24d ago
Every year social media hits me hard with "No Man's Sky is good now!" — and I bit and dove in with a few buddies. To say everything in this game is half baked is giving it too much credit. It's 10% baked at best. This isn't a game; it's an underwhelming tech demo. The only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great. Everything else is baaaad: the quests have less logic than entry MMO quests, and are mainly fetch missions. The planets are randomly generated slop. The economy of building up your ship/fleet isn't fun (you just sell your ships over and over again). Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?) It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that are clearly just trying to trick folks into buying an elaborate space game tech demo. Can we move on from this "game"?
- simoncion 24d ago
  > Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?) FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1. IIRC, back in the v1 days you'd give an NPC a species-specific valuable trinket and they'd teach you a randomly-selected word of their race's language. Learning words was useful for when you'd encounter a historical relic that presented an important scene from history, and when you encountered an NPC that was requesting assistance. In both cases, they'd make their speech or request in their native language, you'd be given a few context clues in the form of dialog describing gestures, NPC attitude, etc, and then you'd have to guess what action you needed to perform or resource of yours they needed. If you get it right, you get something nice. Like many other systems in the game, this got reworked several times into what it is now: "Find an NPC, ask for language assistance, select a category of word to learn, and Bob's your uncle.". I won't claim that either the v1 or current methods of learning language are fun, but the v1 method did consume a resource that was often difficult to come by... so it made learning the language much more difficult. They could have cooked up three whole-ass conlangs and built in gradual language tutorials for each... but that'd be a surprising choice for a game whose most difficult puzzles are "Can you do basic arithmetic?" and "Can you understand which direction this list of numbers is rotating?". There's never been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both got what they were being told by the story and weren't enraged by the implications gets why. The game's first story (such as it is) is why I'm always amused by people who don't dislike it, but also take it very seriously and want there to be a ton of stuff to do in it. Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of stuff [0] over the years. I'm amazed that they're making enough money on the game to still be working on it a decade later, but here we are. > It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that... Eh. As someone who pops back in for a few hours when there's a major change, I don't mind at all the detailed patch notes. > Can we move on from this "game"? Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it. [0] ...some of which is clearly playtesting for things planned for Light No Fire...
saejox 24d ago
they add feature after feature. but never a good drive for the player. 'why should i go to this planet?' i have an idea for it, Let users populate the universe with custom quests. Scriptable quests with dialog and multipart structure. You need a custom script language and some limitations on it. Example quests: - "Bandits have occupied our town", but actually bandits are tax collectors. You instead may help them document the goods. - "Our star is dying", instead a huge starhip is recharging and refusing to move without some condition. also add a rumor system to lead players to quests. you can use my idea Hello Games, you have my permission.
mattbrewsbytes 24d ago
This is why a cool tech solution (procedural generation of "levels") by itself isn't good enough. The core gameplay loop is fundamentally the same on every planet. The graphics and descriptions may change but once you've played it for a bit, it gets boring. I think video games are art, so take my opinion in context of if this is right up your alley and you really love it, then keep on keepin on!
- newsoftheday 23d ago
  > This is why a cool tech solution (procedural generation of "levels") by itself isn't good enough. It's more than good enough for me and the roughly 10K typical players per month, and that's just on Steam. I prefer procgen, I do not prefer hand crafted planet games, nothing changes in them.
magic_hamster 24d ago
It's a great game to play with friends. Explore, find cool animals, and most of all - build your fantasy space home. It's relaxing, fun, and can be a great shared experience. I imagine it wouldn't be quite as engaging completely by yourself.
a34729t 24d ago
This is why you really need a good geologic, climate etc models. Like a full blown simulation.
beloch 24d ago
NMS's art-style is low-detail, but highly aesthetic. It can look amazing at times, but only when you're looking at grand cinematic vistas. It rarely looks good in closeups. This parallels the game's systems in many ways. NMS is a technically impressive game. You can build a custom-spaceship, either with the in-game editor or by importing one from outside the game, dogfight in it, land on alien worlds, etc. and that's just one of the loops. However, the spaceships you build aren't simulated physical objects. They don't even feel as substantial as styrofoam fins tacked onto a model train. There's no real challenge to flying them. They all just float through space like nothing. The game has dozens of ways to progress, finding resources and earning cash. They're all so easy to break that you have to consciously resist doing so. Craft a few donuts and you're rich. You don't have to worry about finding buyers for your obscenely high-end pastries. The market board will buy anything at the listed price. Game breaking bugs that trivialize finding resources have been left in the game forever because the developers were afraid that some people might be upset if they actually had to grind for resources. Why what is, ostensibly, a single player game with multiplayer support tacked on even has grind mechanics is another valid question. I log into NMS occasionally, but my big problem with it is that it's gameplay devolves into a sequence of grinds that are all optional. The things that should offer a challenge (e.g. ship combat) don't. Every play session becomes a case of, "Where do I find this stupid mineral I need to build an upgrade that will make what's already too easy even easier?". The technology on display in NMS is absolutely impressive, but the gameplay isn't. I'd love to see a fork of this game where they focus on more challenging gameplay with less focus on grinding and sandbox elements. I see the expeditions as an attempt at this, but they don't go far enough.
- IceDane 24d ago
  It's been years since I last played it, but when I did I finally did so for a while until I finally found myself at a space station with other players and whatnot. And some random dude just gives me something like tens and tens of millions in cash. And my friend. And a bunch of other people in the same station. At that point I was still rather new to the game. I had little money, few resources, understood little - which was the whole game for me. Discovering new stuff and trying to make money. And being given all that money sort of just .. ruined the game for me. What was left was the very meh storyline and maybe exploration, neither of which had any appeal to me.
cynicalsecurity 24d ago
That's because there were no idea behind it in the first place. It was an ambitious overpromising project that hasn't delivered almost anything they promised. They didn't have any story or interesting gameplay in mind too. Pity.
danielvaughn 24d ago
I had a different experience. I bought it on day one in 2016, and like everyone else, I was wowed by the planet hopping experience for about an hour or so. Then I put it down and didn't think about it again. Then I picked it up a few years later, and discovered base building. Had more fun than the first playthrough, but it didn't click. Eventually I hear about something called the Galactic Hub, which is a star system marked by players as a central spot to build their bases. Kind of like a human home in the vast empty universe of NMS. I get curious about it, and look up instructions on how to get there. I did some quick napkin math and realized it would take literally dozens of hours of grinding - nonstop travel - to get there. However, as it turns out, there's a loophole with black holes. When you enter a black hole, it spits you out into a totally different place in the galaxy. From the players perspective its random, but players got together and figured out that each unique black hole always sends you to the same spot in the galaxy. So they constructed a black hole "highway", along with an app that let you input your desired coordinates, and it would give you the list of black holes that would most optimally get you near your destination. So I spend an evening playing the game, switching back and forth from the game to my laptop, inputting coordinates and slowly making my way closer and closer to the hub. Eventually I find it, and what was amazing was that it was the first time I'd seen any evidence of another player in the game. That moment felt utterly magical, because while I was playing a game, I had an actual, real objective that I formed entirely on my own. So yes, the game is an odd duck, but it can really open up with the right mindset.
- jrootabega 19d ago
  That kind of play is pretty rare these days. The current way is to put in portal coordinates (which are pretty much mandatory in NMS social media) and just walk through to the destination. Or have someone take you there from the Anomaly. And while what you did is still possible and cool, would you have still done it if given the chance to take a portal? Would most players? (No.)
joshuaheard 24d ago
I had some great moments in NMS. But, you're right, it needs a plot or storyline to follow.
SwellJoe 24d ago
The best things about the game (and it is a good game at this point, they continued to add to it at a steady pace since launch) are the human written stories. But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast. But also, the worst thing about the human-written stories is that they're often transparently designed around getting you to visit more abandoned malls. The procgen infinity of space is almost a negative, even though it's the game's whole schtick. I guess now that I think of it like that, it's really impressive they made a fun game despite having to make it fit a boring repetitive universe.
- p-e-w 24d ago
  > But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast. Ironically, that’s how I always imagined actual space exploration to turn out once the initial wonders are exhausted. Space is huge, yes, and everything is kinda unique, but also not in a meaningful sense. Most of the continued amazement we associate with the idea of space exploration comes from human-written stories that fill space with a human variety that just isn’t there.
- cchance 24d ago
  The thing is they could probably have easily had the pvp and economy and soverignty of eve, and that would have been amazing
  - SwellJoe 24d ago
    There really are a lot of things that they could do it with it, but they've already done a lot of things over the years; you can't say they haven't tried things, though I can't say they've always delivered a fun experience with the various experiments. They did pets and pet battles (boring to me), various building ideas (freighters and corvettes, bases, moderately more interesting), trading (I don't care for the implementation, feels detached), salvage, colonization (you become the governor of existing towns and make them run more efficiently and build stuff), etc. And, the worlds and critters got more varied several times over the years since release. In short, I found it a very fun game until it wasn't, and then I had no reason to log back in. There are things you can do to make your own fun outside the story line; grind for a better freighter, find an build on interesting/valuable planets, find the coolest ships. Once the story ran out, I was pretty much done, but even if you just play the story and then quit, it's still an excellent value! I got many hours of enjoyment out of a game I paid maybe $20 for. It's a hell of an entertainment deal. I recommend it to anyone who hasn't played it all the way through in recent-ish times. Even if you only play the story out one time and don't find any of the other stuff fun, it's still a very enjoyable game with hours of fun play at a good price that runs well on any decent system. If I were a designer on the game, I'd find more reasons for human players to be in the same places at the same time and have their actions have a lasting impact in the universe. Riding in someone else's ship (which is what corvettes added) aint it, though. Projects to colonize specific worlds where anyone can stake a claim in a landrush type thing and maybe you setup competitive trade networks or battle for terrain or strategic resources or whatever, would be super fun, I think. And, I wish space battles were more skill-based, as well. I've never played Eve, but I assume the space battles require skill and strategy and not just the biggest/baddest ship? So, if NMS got really good space battle mechanics, they could implement crazy cool space wars. But, they've got to shrink the game world for that to work (not literally delete the billions of planets, just give players a reason to all fight over one planet or system). Maybe competing for unique resources, like the spice on Dune. I'll definitely try to find time to log back in and check out the new stuff. Whether it keeps me coming back after I try out all the new stuff and run whatever new missions/stories they've introduced remains to be seen. But, I don't think anyone plays it for the "billions of worlds" thing, because they're all the same after you see the first couple dozen.
AceJohnny2 24d ago
I tried it a few years ago, following all the "It's actually good now!" stories. But a few hours into the tutorial, at a point of yet another "go gather 20 wolf Pel^H^H Ores from that other planet and bring it back", and I lost interest. The inner gameplay loop didn't work for me, and I need that hook. Have there since been improvements to that inner loop? In contrast, Destiny 2 keeps hooking me back in because its inner loop, the gunplay and abilities, and variety of builds, really works for me.
waffletower 24d ago
NMS seems to epitomize the excesses of the Agile development philosophy with most of their release updates -- small targeted tack-ons to the game engine that provide something tangible yet shallow for users to explore, usually disconnected from narrative. The same cargo drop configurations, how damaged containers always require removing the same rusted metal or goop, and how shelters have the same exact configuration, never ever evolve or change. It has such a strangely repetitive ghost town character. They could easily target their "agile" deliverables around diversifying and breathing more life into the worlds if they could span more "sprints". Unfortuntately, the tack-ons feel hollow, empty, and often ship incredibly buggy. They used procedural modeling to create an impressive array of planets, but never modeled the planet drops with the same care and diversity.
_s_a_m_ 24d ago
i played it day 1 back then and even bought a PS4 only to play it and played it over the years repeatedly after every larger update for about 1000 hours in total. The fundamental promise they made was never shipped, which was originally a large variety of procedural flora, fauna, and planet. It is still the same uninspired boring stale core that it was day 1 with minimal extensions which produce absolutely boring world that immediately repeat. The game was always Waiting for Godot, waiting for a game that was originally announced with an interesting procedural feature but never shipped. Meanwhile I discovered the history of procedural games, which is a story of fails. I still sometimes hope that the actually rewrote the entire procedural variety system but it cant happen because people built persistent shit on those planets. They probably have to launch a new game.
dom96 24d ago
A played it, got stuck in a giant crater with seemingly no way to get out of it. That was basically the extent of my experience.
- throwatdem12311 24d ago
  When up against a wall you have infinite jetpack but the game doesn’t really tell you this.
Waterluvian 24d ago
I remember when it first came out, there was so much hype but I immediately wondered, “where exactly is the game loop?” I also remember how aggressively defensive fans were about it.
c7b 24d ago
I remember first hearing about NMS' concept and wishing that they would take the general idea but downsize it by at least 10 orders of magnitude. A universe with 1-100 millions of planets would still feel absolutely massive and way more than individual players would be able to exhaust, yet it would allow the creators to do a bit better curation, allow players to actually meet, maybe add more hand-crafted experiences. Basically, give up on technical purity in favor of fun.
- fwip 24d ago
  They added real multiplayer several years ago. If you go to the same system another player is in, they'll be there. (As well as everything anybody has ever built there).
  - jrootabega 24d ago
    But you are pretty much guaranteed never to meet anyone while roaming around randomly. Only if you go to a galaxy center, the Anomaly, an expedition, or matchmake into someone else's game (is that still a thing?)
- newsoftheday 23d ago
  I specifically do not want hand crafted planets, it's one of the first things I look at for a space game, 1. is the planet procgen, 2. does it let me land on planets, 3. can I dig/shape the terrain (voxel). I'm aware of NMS and Empyrion - Galactic Survival. In some ways, Empyrion has better planets than NMS in my view and far fewer of them, it might be the game you're looking for.
zhainya 24d ago
This perfectly describes how this game makes me feel.
00ze 24d ago
Video games have always been part tech demo And the story aspects are played out no different than Hollywood NMS has more in common with Minecraft. It's a virtual chat room that looks Star Wars-y Also don't discount simply not being a kid anymore. Biology isn't static. Memory does not allow for that same initial burst of excitement.
m12k 24d ago
I've heard it described as "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle"
- trueno 24d ago
  bout 5 months ago i gave it 2 hours of my life and asked for a refund once i realized i had basically seen the whole game in that first like 30 minutes of playing. the only game that seems to hit the mark of what im actually itching for is star citizen that is in a perpetual state of never-finished but i can't even quite put a finger on what it is i'm after. beauty, art, real weather, being able to fly up through the atmosphere and just let me escape into a sci fi movie. i can acknowledge star citizen has actually come a long ways and i think they do deliver that, though i haven't played it myself just going off vids ive seen. NMS somehow feels like a visual and playable interpretation of depression to me with a Dr. Seuss world backdrop lol. Like it reminds me of times in my life where I've just been stuck in the motions, unhappy, resigning myself to the fate of doing absolutely nothing of inspiration because I felt like I had no other options and gave up. Shout outs to steam for refunding when my reason was "This game is actually depressing"
Barrin92 24d ago
>but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. to me that has become a big positive aspect of the game. The non-teleology of it, that you just run around and immersive yourself in it is pleasant in its own right. Especially modern games to me seem to have substituted games as an experience with reward system driven busy work. Everything is always instrumental. I started to notice this when games like Journey came out, or Death Stranding during the stress of the pandemic. No Man's Sky is obviously not as artistically strong as either one but the exploration only for explorations sake has me come back to it very regularly. It genuinely is a game about nothing (so is Seinfeld, never hurt the show) but to me that boredom is a genuinely good thing.
khernandezrt 24d ago
Right on the nail.
Dlemlo 24d ago
Yepp. Biggest buy misstake ever.
withinrafael 24d ago
Every time these epic announcements go out, I try co-op multiplayer again, realize it's still miserable, then close it and wait for the next release. I'd love to play it with my wife but completing our own objectives, building our own bases, not being able to directly interact like in other games this decade, progressing forward separately, fixing our own ships, etc. etc. etc. is just a non-starter. Good luck to them though!
jmyeet 24d ago
How people interact with LEGO varies. Some people like to buy specific sets and make them. That's fine. Some people see a random pile of bricks and build a massive city [1]. There are also competition events for what people can build from a random pile of bricks. There was a TV show about this too (ie Lego Masters). Some games are problem solving, others are competitive, yet others are elimination but an awful lot of games have a component that requires you to inject imagination. The Sims and even Minecraft (despite it having a survival mode too) spring to mind. That's what NMS is. Some people like to find the perfect looking ship. Others build bases to look a certain way. Others just explore. Yet others make money. If that's not for you, that's OK. But NMS can't be dismissed as being repetitive or boring. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfVCmkexl2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfVCmkexl2E
cchance 24d ago
To me it feels like what i actually want is Eve's economy, PVP/PVE strapped onto the noman gameplay, at least personaly
ghshephard 24d ago
If you are interested in the sandbox element, and space, and building - but want character - Satisfactory pulled me in for roughly 1200 hours over three years. I"ve got the scenery, and new discovery's burned in to my brain - elements of the landscape are more vivid in my memory than a lot of real places I've visited. What's interesting is that there is zero procedural generation - single world with about 20 Biome, each one with all sorts of character. Monsters are incredibly well balanced, and the sheer terror I got from the spiders (which I think are a tad OP - especially the ones that launch)_ triggered my fight-flight reflex (mostly flight) more than any other game I can recall. The game can be played in so many different ways too - you can take the factorio/big factory build out approach and speed run that, or just spend your time exploring, or, perhaps best of all - watch hundreds of hours of Youtube Videos to get a sense of the architect aesthetic that some of the top players bring to it. Epic Tech Tree. Cute back story. I consider it the greatest Sandbox/space game ever - I don't know if we'll ever see anything like it again.
protocolture 24d ago
I opened the game. Played 30 minutes. Found a start of game bug that blocks progression. Looked online, everyone claims this exact bug had been squashed years before. Started a new game. Bug returned. Left it for a few days. Bugs still there. No workaround. Raised a thread somewhere. Got yelled at for "Pretending" to have the bug. Uninstalled the game. My 2 cents is that it looked like a really shitty MMO with nothing on top, but I cant really say because it never let me leave the tutorial.
anon-3988 24d ago
Do you think the same of Minecraft?
petterroea 24d ago
When it first released I correctly predicted that the game was overhyped and destined to flop, making fun of friends who bought the game and ending up being disappointed. The internet historian video made me buy it, thinking it was maybe worth it now. I think I got like 5 hours in before feeling like I was just doing an endless grind. I felt like I had fallen for the hype, which I think was deserved ;) Maybe the game doesn't get good until you grind past the first N hours, but I just don't have the time any more.
golly_ned 24d ago
By 'coming back', do you mean actually firing it up and playing it?
mastermage 24d ago
Weird take cause the game is definetely there and it has tons of content. Admitedly it is not for me because I just do not like the way resource gathering works. Does not tickle my fancy. But saying there is nothing substantial is an odd take, there is base building, space battles (fighter and corvette), expeditions. You can even do a little automatisation if you are into it.
tnolet 24d ago
Exactly sums up my experience. Bought it day one. Still bores the hell out of me.
madrox 24d ago
I like to tinker with making games now and then, and I have learned that there are lots of game ideas I have that are more fun to make than play. A lot of those look like No Mans Sky. I feel like the devs fell in love with procedural generation and never thought about what kind of experience they want to have. I say this because I feel the same thing as you when I go back, and I really want to like it.
saidnooneever 24d ago
considering the company still exist and servers are still up I assume not everyone shares your opinion. its a pretty good milestone for an online game. not everyone enjoys the same kind of gameplay.
- newsoftheday 23d ago
  Indeed, https://steamdb.info/app/275850/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/275850/charts/ shows it ticked up with Cosmos but the typical average of around 10K players isn't bad.
monegator 24d ago
Same. Every time i re-download it and start a new game I never get past the tutorial because i was so incredibly bored so soon, i always wanted to like this game and i love how much effort they keep making but... sandboxes games are just so boring.
AlfeG 24d ago
Because most of the new feature are not connected to each other. Take a gravition coil. It's like in Half Life - but You can only use with very limited set of objects, that were added in same update as gravition coil. Make it useless and not fun...
rbreve 24d ago
The first 50 hours of NMS are really great but then you start to learn the patterns, even though it is a randomized/procedural, at some point it becomes predictable and boring. The other problem is that the battles are boring, they lack something and building big ships and bases feels pointless.
deleted 24d ago
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newsoftheday 23d ago
Your tastes for video games may be more aligned with another genre than a sandbox game which is what NMS is. If so, that's not a reflection of any kind on NMS.

margalabargala 24d ago

A mile wide, and an inch deep

m4rtink 24d ago
Yeah, that is exactly my issue with the game - they crammed so many mechanics into the game, but all of them are incredibly shallow & even unfinished. The RNG space is part of the problem - planets and biomes kinda start to repeat after while and it is not really important any more on which weird planet or station you are. It is actually interesting how many games with much smaller RNG generated world maps work just fine because you don't travel so much like in NMS & kinda learn to know the landscape and also shape it yourself or with your friends. Like you know there is a lake next to you base and that deserted town, then there is that forested mountain where you got ambushed by zombies once & built a secondary mining base later, etc. In NMS you land on a random planet, build a base on it and - like, what is it good for, if there are millions of similar planets & coop multiplayer is almost non-existent.
- goatking 24d ago
  Also the existing mechanics are overly simplified. Like space combat...

BISH-BASH-BOSH 24d ago

I was just about to say this. I have a lot of respect for the dev team but man is it so not my type of game. I wish somehow the complexity of eve could meet a game like this. I would sell a kidney for that

darreninthenet 24d ago
The X games?
gavinray 24d ago
X4?
sfn42 24d ago
I recently tried star citizen and it's kind of trying to be something like that but it's way too half baked with lots of game breaking bugs like you'll just lose the entire cargo of your ship which can completely bankrupt you after days of saving up. Also they keep releasing bigger and fancier pay to win ships at ridiculous price points like hundreds and even thousands of dollars instead of fixing the game. I tried it during a free week and I legitimately enjoyed it a lot but I was also extremely frustrated a lot by the bugs and the pay to win crap really rubs me the wrong way so I didn't buy it after the free trial ended. It's a weird mix of amazingly well done and absolute garbage. And pay to win. Don't forget about the pay to win bullshit.
- shmeeed 24d ago
  I don't know about the PTW aspect. What's there to win in a broken sandbox? In my view, they mostly just keep ripping off delusional "collectors" to keep the gravy train going. It's not like these solo players then take off in their huge multi-crew ships and are able to "win" in any meaningful sense. A few years ago, I had a couple dozen hours of good fun with my starter pack just zooming around all those moons and planets, stepping out of my tiny ship and holding my breath, not knowing much about what awaits me outside - scorching heat, a blizzard, hostile or friendly players... it felt like I got my money's worth if space immersion. If you don't expect much in the way of an actual game, but are content with a few game loops held together by string and duct tape, you can find a vast and pretty universe to explore. Reeaallyyy gotta manage your expectations, though. It's very much an alpha, and you better not think it's gonna release, like, ever. Disclaimer: I have no idea how it's evolved in the past years.
  - 24d ago

actusual 24d ago

I feel the same. I want Rust in space, where there are constant stakes. NMS either takes too long to get to a part of the game where stakes become relevant, or doesn't have any. If anyone has any recs on PvE/looting/base building games in space with the polish of NMS, please share.

fwip 24d ago
EVE online?

nullbio 24d ago

Agreed. It's incredibly boring. It lacks an interesting and interactive story with good pacing. What they have done is cool, don't get me wrong, but I think they got carried away by the tech coolness without enough attention to what makes a game fun or interesting.

jimmyjazz14 24d ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I have tried coming back to the game multiple times and every time I just feel bored and underwhelmed by the whole experience.

kjs3 24d ago
Yeah...I played it for probably a couple of hundred hours...and it wasn't that fun. In fact, it's boring. And I've come back a too many times because someone (like some of the commenters here) said "no, man...get the new update! It's a Totally Different Game!". So I jump back in, and it's different to varying degrees...and still boring. Just because there's "lots to do! new quests! rare items to find!", doesn't mean doing them is fun.
- famahar 24d ago
  What made you play a game for a couple of hundred hours to then conclude that it is boring? I played the first release and put in roughly 100 hours. The first 90 hours were wonderful. Eventually I realized that I wasn't enjoying it as much so I put it down. But I would never call those 90 hours boring. I felt like I got a lot of value out of it, and have fond memories of discovering interesting planets. I really view NMS as an artistic experience. I don't care for the gameplay loops. I played this game like an curious explorer. There are infinite planets, many feel the same but occasionally you land on something so special that no one else has ever seen.
  - kjs3 23d ago
    What made you play a game for a couple of hundred hours to then conclude that it is boring? Because I really wanted to like it? Because it didn't get boring immediately? Because the updates kept promising to make it better? I dunno, does that justify my actions enough to satisfy you, or are my observations somehow invalid because I kept beating my head against the thing for what we apparently both agree was far too long?
    - famahar 20d ago

jasonjmcghee 24d ago

A big name in proc gen is Kate Compton who coined the term "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" to describe this phenomenon of technically unique but not different enough to matter - I googled "10000 bowls of oatmeal" to see if there was a good article and the second link was about it and nms https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowls-of-plain-oatmeal/ https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...

meowface 24d ago
One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity. It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.
- nemomarx 24d ago
  You want to look at dwarf fortress talks for that, I think?
  - OkayPhysicist 24d ago
    IMO, Dwarf Fortress benefits greatly from the player seeing relatively few samples of the world gen, and the geography actually mattering to gameplay. The actual geography doesn't vary that wildly most of the time ( if you've seen one lightly forested river valley, you've seen them all), but players generate a relatively low number of worlds, and in each world probably only see a handful of sites, where dwarf-scale world gen actually matters. Unlike NMS, though, the details of world gen matter to gameplay a lot. Trade caravans and invading armies can't traverse mountain ranges and ocean, so a mountainous peninsula can be extremely isolated. At the site level, you'll probably want to design your fortress to take advantage of local geography to help fortify your fortress and provide resources, so terrain and features like rivers, volcanoes, etc. placement matters a lot. In contrast, No Man's Sky world gen feels pretty tangent to the actual gameplay. The game does a good enough job incentivizing you to explore lots of planets, but in terms of the survival/base-building aspects, there's a pretty short list of resources that matter to deciding where to setup, and geography hardly matters in terms of how you build.

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generallee5686 24d ago

Agreed. I want to like this game _so bad_ but I think the problem is that I'm looking for a feeling of fulfilling progression when in reality this game is just a bunch of disjointed sandboxes which is certainly not my type of game.

newsoftheday 23d ago
Sandbox games aren't really progression games, that takes a far more refined game focus; else you'd have to have a mainframe to run it.

Avicebron 24d ago

I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse". A thought that comes to me as I type this is what if you try to co-evolve the ecosystems so it doesn't feel like it's just a mix of the same base components in different quantities.

jackmott42 24d ago
The best proc gen experience I have had is with minecraft modpack called hexxit. The world is procedural generated, but then there is a library of ~200+ hand built structures/features that are scattered throughout the generated terrain. So you wander through a forest and find a cave into a volcano full of diamongs but guarded by angry dwarves, then head over into the desert and find a castle with a witch king, etc etc There are enough hand built things that you don't quickly start running into repeats, and they are just melded into the generated terrain.
- opium_tea 24d ago
  That sounds a lot like that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup approach of randomly generated floors/levels with designed "vaults" emplaced within them
- vablings 24d ago
  This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept
  - rcxdude 24d ago
    Reminds me of bones files in nethack.
    - omoikane 24d ago
      I was going to say, NetHack doesn't feel sparse to me, but maybe I just have not played enough NetHack. I think it's due to the fact that there is a fair bit of content, but the interface drip-feeds them very slowly, combined with the difficulty of the game itself that prevents users from finding all possible ways to interact with all content.

avazhi 24d ago

How I feel as well. This game just doesn't scale well from mid game on - it's way too easy, even on permadeath + hardest difficulty. Like, making money is way too easy, combat is way too easy, everything is too forgiving. And the entire loop is centered on like, 3 things to do that are all variants of the same exact thing. Really hope they do a much better job in Light No Fire. To the guy who replied to me: Our genius overlord moderators rate limited my responses so I'll post here. > I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding You and I have very different ideas of what forgiving means. A reasonably intelligent 7 year old that enjoys and has experience playing video games could play this game on max difficulty settings and not have any issues. And while I never had an issue finding anything (shit is literally everywhere), resource scarcity doesn't equally an unforgiving game mechanic unless it's gated by some sort of difficult fight or something, which this game doesn't have. Combat is laughably easy and repetitive. I've got a couple hundred hours in the game, and at one point I was running the same bounty missions over and over again for some outrageous amount of money - the mission took 7 minutes round trip, the combat encounter was literally the exact same every time, same number of enemies just with different names. And that was the most efficient way I could make money in late game on the permadeath server on max settings. If that's the best economy loop a game can come up with, a 100% brainless combat encounter, then the developer has done something very wrong.

micromacrofoot 24d ago
it's because it's a sandbox farming game, it's not meant to be difficult you spend most of your time finding/farming resources and unlocking builds most of your time is traveling between planets/systems/galaxies for different resources I wouldn't say it's too forgiving on resource grinding, which is the core gameplay, you can easily miss it if you don't play for 40+ hours but there are entire varieties of star systems you can't access initially, an entire race you literally can't see without completing some strings of missions, etc

mrnotcrazy 24d ago

I think this kind of game needs another innovation to make it interesting. I don't think adding more generative or LLM generated content is the solution.

ramesh31 24d ago

It's kind of like ARK, they spent so much time on all the "cool" stuff that looks great in trailers without focusing on what actually would make a game like this incredible, which is a real persistent singular world with consequences and meaningful group based PVP or PVE that works at scale. What you end up with is just a simulacra of multiplayer that basically boils down to a visually represented Xbox Live lobby.

verst 24d ago

Agreed. And this tech demo was a day 1 purchase for me back in the day. While it has gotten better since then it just doesn't hold my interest. I do like using it whenever every few months I feel inclined to get my PC VR headset out (I'm using an old HO Reverb G2 with the Oasis driver) I think it's a great VR title.

JohnMakin 24d ago

Are you sure that you've played it recently? They added an actual story, a huge quest hub, unique items, tons of stuff to do really. I'm quite overwhelmed with the amount of things to do and I don't typically enjoy sandboxes.

jwoods19 24d ago
I also recently came back to it and liked the story and progression system a lot more, especially on their "casual" mode.
mortenjorck 24d ago
I've bounced off NMS several times, but each time I come back, I reason that they've added so many systems now that the procedural generation must finally feel genuinely deep and interesting. And maybe it has, but the first 60 minutes of the game still feel like enough of a slog that I have yet to get to any of the good stuff.
- JohnMakin 24d ago
  The first 60 minutes are definitely a slog, but once you open up access to the quest hub and get access to larger ships that function as bases, the game really opens up. I play it as a "get away" from more competitive/stressful games. The exploration of planets never really appealed to me and doesn't feel like a huge component of the game as much as maybe it did in the early days unless you're hunting for particular resource nodes.
  - noir_lord 24d ago
    Same, it's basically sci-fi Minecraft, it's just a chill game you can potter about doing whatever you want in.
goatking 24d ago
Not OP, but my main issue is that after visiting a few systems and a bunch of planets, you kinda saw everything the procedural generation has to offer, and visiting planets becomes boring quickly, at least for me. There are differences, and as someone mentioned there are some unique planets for sure, but for the most part they all look samey. Wildlife is also just walking/flying around doing nothing. This takes away the incentive to go and explore, which is supposed to be the main attraction to the game

jklinger410 24d ago

I feel the same way about Starfield. Just soulless projects instead of engaging video games.

0x457 24d ago
Starfield is IMO worse. NMS at least has sandboxes that can entertain you and expeditions can be fun. NMS just doesn't have "goal" to work towards, so unless you can create your own goals its boring. Starfield, bugs aside, had the most boring base-building/operations I've seen in my life.

KronisLV 24d ago

You do occasionally find some pretty cool stuff. I found a barren planet in a black hole system where the vibe was all dark and shadowy with the light being tinted purple, and just some crystals or something on the surface, alongside a damaged robot that you could interact with. There was also a world that had high Sentinel activity where I founded a settlement (well, more like took over managing it), however as it turns out it’d have those gravity storms often during which you could soar through the air. There was also a world where the surface was toxic and you couldn’t stay on it for long, so I excavated a base underground, like something out of Red Faction. For what it’s worth, a lot of it can feel samey (most of the scanning) and kinda boring, but while there aren’t that many insanely huge and cinematic moments, sometimes RNG hits just right and you get something nice.

IceDane 24d ago
That sounds cool, but it's either a handcrafted world (if NMS has those) or pure luck. If it's the latter, then it can't have any depth. At best it can have some procedurally generated content that's going to be something you've seen before. Looks cool, but no substance.

raincole 24d ago

It more or less reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode. They were playing an asteroid shooting. > Morty: it's boring. crank up the realism slider to max > Rick: why does it get even more empty? Wait, I got it... because the universe is empty. At the end, I think there is little point in simulating the vastness of the universe in a video game (even just a fraction of it).

latexr 24d ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1uLHmxmcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1uLHmxmcg
estebank 24d ago
I don't think that simulating the vastness of the universe is ever going to be fun, but approximating a theme park ride that evokes the vastness of the universe can be breathtaking, like Outer Wilds was. (The gameplay is confined to a single solar system, but it certainly makes you feel both the a sense of adventure, and the vastness of space-time.)
trashb 24d ago
"I have never thought to myself that realism is fun" - Gabe Newell
- TylerE 24d ago
  True realism is often interesting though, which provides more long term engagement than fleeting shallow fun. Look at some of the hard core 3rd party addons for flight sims, for instance, which are so realistic they actually ship licensed versions of the real aircraft training manuals and checklists - because every switch and procedure works.
  - djeastm 24d ago
    It's interesting for a niche audience (and I'm one of them). But that's a small minority of gamers (and $$$).
  - 24d ago

whichdan 24d ago

I kinda feel the same way. I loved slowly going through the main story and probably put 50hr into the game, but the sandbox alone (amazing as it is) just doesn't do it for me.

RIMR 24d ago

I felt this way for a while until I decided to sit down, start a new game, and engage with it. It's a completely different game, it just doesn't look like it if you picked back up where you left off. Without the right context, you have a tendency to just repeat what you were doing before, and it feels like nothing changed. But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.

drooopy 24d ago

Exactly how I feel about this game. While its redemption arc is one for the history books, every time I come back to it, I feel nothing.

1970-01-01 24d ago

Disney found this out the hard way with Infinity. On v3.0 a large chunk of their IP was staged into a fully customizable and open universe.. and it was so unremarkable that they shutdown the servers and killed all development a few years later.

spandrew 24d ago

Every year social media hits me hard with "No Man's Sky is good now!" — and I bit and dove in with a few buddies. To say everything in this game is half baked is giving it too much credit. It's 10% baked at best. This isn't a game; it's an underwhelming tech demo. The only cool feature of the game is the planet to space flight transition. It's seamless, and looks great. Everything else is baaaad: the quests have less logic than entry MMO quests, and are mainly fetch missions. The planets are randomly generated slop. The economy of building up your ship/fleet isn't fun (you just sell your ships over and over again). Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?) It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that are clearly just trying to trick folks into buying an elaborate space game tech demo. Can we move on from this "game"?

simoncion 24d ago
> Understanding alien languages isn't fun (and weirdly, has no UX thought put into it?) FWIW, most of the systems in the game that have been there since the beginning have changed significantly since v1. IIRC, back in the v1 days you'd give an NPC a species-specific valuable trinket and they'd teach you a randomly-selected word of their race's language. Learning words was useful for when you'd encounter a historical relic that presented an important scene from history, and when you encountered an NPC that was requesting assistance. In both cases, they'd make their speech or request in their native language, you'd be given a few context clues in the form of dialog describing gestures, NPC attitude, etc, and then you'd have to guess what action you needed to perform or resource of yours they needed. If you get it right, you get something nice. Like many other systems in the game, this got reworked several times into what it is now: "Find an NPC, ask for language assistance, select a category of word to learn, and Bob's your uncle.". I won't claim that either the v1 or current methods of learning language are fun, but the v1 method did consume a resource that was often difficult to come by... so it made learning the language much more difficult. They could have cooked up three whole-ass conlangs and built in gradual language tutorials for each... but that'd be a surprising choice for a game whose most difficult puzzles are "Can you do basic arithmetic?" and "Can you understand which direction this list of numbers is rotating?". There's never been much _game_ in NMS... and most any player who's made it to the center of the galaxy and both got what they were being told by the story and weren't enraged by the implications gets why. The game's first story (such as it is) is why I'm always amused by people who don't dislike it, but also take it very seriously and want there to be a ton of stuff to do in it. Having said that, Hello Games has apparently been more than happy to add in a bunch of stuff [0] over the years. I'm amazed that they're making enough money on the game to still be working on it a decade later, but here we are. > It's been a decade and I'm tired of seeing ads like this that... Eh. As someone who pops back in for a few hours when there's a major change, I don't mind at all the detailed patch notes. > Can we move on from this "game"? Go for it! I'll still be popping in every now and again to screw around with it. [0] ...some of which is clearly playtesting for things planned for Light No Fire...

saejox 24d ago

they add feature after feature. but never a good drive for the player. 'why should i go to this planet?' i have an idea for it, Let users populate the universe with custom quests. Scriptable quests with dialog and multipart structure. You need a custom script language and some limitations on it. Example quests: - "Bandits have occupied our town", but actually bandits are tax collectors. You instead may help them document the goods. - "Our star is dying", instead a huge starhip is recharging and refusing to move without some condition. also add a rumor system to lead players to quests. you can use my idea Hello Games, you have my permission.

mattbrewsbytes 24d ago

This is why a cool tech solution (procedural generation of "levels") by itself isn't good enough. The core gameplay loop is fundamentally the same on every planet. The graphics and descriptions may change but once you've played it for a bit, it gets boring. I think video games are art, so take my opinion in context of if this is right up your alley and you really love it, then keep on keepin on!

newsoftheday 23d ago
> This is why a cool tech solution (procedural generation of "levels") by itself isn't good enough. It's more than good enough for me and the roughly 10K typical players per month, and that's just on Steam. I prefer procgen, I do not prefer hand crafted planet games, nothing changes in them.

magic_hamster 24d ago

It's a great game to play with friends. Explore, find cool animals, and most of all - build your fantasy space home. It's relaxing, fun, and can be a great shared experience. I imagine it wouldn't be quite as engaging completely by yourself.

a34729t 24d ago

This is why you really need a good geologic, climate etc models. Like a full blown simulation.

beloch 24d ago

NMS's art-style is low-detail, but highly aesthetic. It can look amazing at times, but only when you're looking at grand cinematic vistas. It rarely looks good in closeups. This parallels the game's systems in many ways. NMS is a technically impressive game. You can build a custom-spaceship, either with the in-game editor or by importing one from outside the game, dogfight in it, land on alien worlds, etc. and that's just one of the loops. However, the spaceships you build aren't simulated physical objects. They don't even feel as substantial as styrofoam fins tacked onto a model train. There's no real challenge to flying them. They all just float through space like nothing. The game has dozens of ways to progress, finding resources and earning cash. They're all so easy to break that you have to consciously resist doing so. Craft a few donuts and you're rich. You don't have to worry about finding buyers for your obscenely high-end pastries. The market board will buy anything at the listed price. Game breaking bugs that trivialize finding resources have been left in the game forever because the developers were afraid that some people might be upset if they actually had to grind for resources. Why what is, ostensibly, a single player game with multiplayer support tacked on even has grind mechanics is another valid question. I log into NMS occasionally, but my big problem with it is that it's gameplay devolves into a sequence of grinds that are all optional. The things that should offer a challenge (e.g. ship combat) don't. Every play session becomes a case of, "Where do I find this stupid mineral I need to build an upgrade that will make what's already too easy even easier?". The technology on display in NMS is absolutely impressive, but the gameplay isn't. I'd love to see a fork of this game where they focus on more challenging gameplay with less focus on grinding and sandbox elements. I see the expeditions as an attempt at this, but they don't go far enough.

IceDane 24d ago
It's been years since I last played it, but when I did I finally did so for a while until I finally found myself at a space station with other players and whatnot. And some random dude just gives me something like tens and tens of millions in cash. And my friend. And a bunch of other people in the same station. At that point I was still rather new to the game. I had little money, few resources, understood little - which was the whole game for me. Discovering new stuff and trying to make money. And being given all that money sort of just .. ruined the game for me. What was left was the very meh storyline and maybe exploration, neither of which had any appeal to me.

cynicalsecurity 24d ago

That's because there were no idea behind it in the first place. It was an ambitious overpromising project that hasn't delivered almost anything they promised. They didn't have any story or interesting gameplay in mind too. Pity.

danielvaughn 24d ago

I had a different experience. I bought it on day one in 2016, and like everyone else, I was wowed by the planet hopping experience for about an hour or so. Then I put it down and didn't think about it again. Then I picked it up a few years later, and discovered base building. Had more fun than the first playthrough, but it didn't click. Eventually I hear about something called the Galactic Hub, which is a star system marked by players as a central spot to build their bases. Kind of like a human home in the vast empty universe of NMS. I get curious about it, and look up instructions on how to get there. I did some quick napkin math and realized it would take literally dozens of hours of grinding - nonstop travel - to get there. However, as it turns out, there's a loophole with black holes. When you enter a black hole, it spits you out into a totally different place in the galaxy. From the players perspective its random, but players got together and figured out that each unique black hole always sends you to the same spot in the galaxy. So they constructed a black hole "highway", along with an app that let you input your desired coordinates, and it would give you the list of black holes that would most optimally get you near your destination. So I spend an evening playing the game, switching back and forth from the game to my laptop, inputting coordinates and slowly making my way closer and closer to the hub. Eventually I find it, and what was amazing was that it was the first time I'd seen any evidence of another player in the game. That moment felt utterly magical, because while I was playing a game, I had an actual, real objective that I formed entirely on my own. So yes, the game is an odd duck, but it can really open up with the right mindset.

jrootabega 19d ago
That kind of play is pretty rare these days. The current way is to put in portal coordinates (which are pretty much mandatory in NMS social media) and just walk through to the destination. Or have someone take you there from the Anomaly. And while what you did is still possible and cool, would you have still done it if given the chance to take a portal? Would most players? (No.)

joshuaheard 24d ago

I had some great moments in NMS. But, you're right, it needs a plot or storyline to follow.

SwellJoe 24d ago

The best things about the game (and it is a good game at this point, they continued to add to it at a steady pace since launch) are the human written stories. But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast. But also, the worst thing about the human-written stories is that they're often transparently designed around getting you to visit more abandoned malls. The procgen infinity of space is almost a negative, even though it's the game's whole schtick. I guess now that I think of it like that, it's really impressive they made a fun game despite having to make it fit a boring repetitive universe.

p-e-w 24d ago
> But, once you've exhausted those human stories, it's like wandering around a few billion abandoned malls. Interesting the first few times, but grows boring pretty fast. Ironically, that’s how I always imagined actual space exploration to turn out once the initial wonders are exhausted. Space is huge, yes, and everything is kinda unique, but also not in a meaningful sense. Most of the continued amazement we associate with the idea of space exploration comes from human-written stories that fill space with a human variety that just isn’t there.
cchance 24d ago
The thing is they could probably have easily had the pvp and economy and soverignty of eve, and that would have been amazing
- SwellJoe 24d ago
  There really are a lot of things that they could do it with it, but they've already done a lot of things over the years; you can't say they haven't tried things, though I can't say they've always delivered a fun experience with the various experiments. They did pets and pet battles (boring to me), various building ideas (freighters and corvettes, bases, moderately more interesting), trading (I don't care for the implementation, feels detached), salvage, colonization (you become the governor of existing towns and make them run more efficiently and build stuff), etc. And, the worlds and critters got more varied several times over the years since release. In short, I found it a very fun game until it wasn't, and then I had no reason to log back in. There are things you can do to make your own fun outside the story line; grind for a better freighter, find an build on interesting/valuable planets, find the coolest ships. Once the story ran out, I was pretty much done, but even if you just play the story and then quit, it's still an excellent value! I got many hours of enjoyment out of a game I paid maybe $20 for. It's a hell of an entertainment deal. I recommend it to anyone who hasn't played it all the way through in recent-ish times. Even if you only play the story out one time and don't find any of the other stuff fun, it's still a very enjoyable game with hours of fun play at a good price that runs well on any decent system. If I were a designer on the game, I'd find more reasons for human players to be in the same places at the same time and have their actions have a lasting impact in the universe. Riding in someone else's ship (which is what corvettes added) aint it, though. Projects to colonize specific worlds where anyone can stake a claim in a landrush type thing and maybe you setup competitive trade networks or battle for terrain or strategic resources or whatever, would be super fun, I think. And, I wish space battles were more skill-based, as well. I've never played Eve, but I assume the space battles require skill and strategy and not just the biggest/baddest ship? So, if NMS got really good space battle mechanics, they could implement crazy cool space wars. But, they've got to shrink the game world for that to work (not literally delete the billions of planets, just give players a reason to all fight over one planet or system). Maybe competing for unique resources, like the spice on Dune. I'll definitely try to find time to log back in and check out the new stuff. Whether it keeps me coming back after I try out all the new stuff and run whatever new missions/stories they've introduced remains to be seen. But, I don't think anyone plays it for the "billions of worlds" thing, because they're all the same after you see the first couple dozen.

AceJohnny2 24d ago

I tried it a few years ago, following all the "It's actually good now!" stories. But a few hours into the tutorial, at a point of yet another "go gather 20 wolf Pel^H^H Ores from that other planet and bring it back", and I lost interest. The inner gameplay loop didn't work for me, and I need that hook. Have there since been improvements to that inner loop? In contrast, Destiny 2 keeps hooking me back in because its inner loop, the gunplay and abilities, and variety of builds, really works for me.

waffletower 24d ago

NMS seems to epitomize the excesses of the Agile development philosophy with most of their release updates -- small targeted tack-ons to the game engine that provide something tangible yet shallow for users to explore, usually disconnected from narrative. The same cargo drop configurations, how damaged containers always require removing the same rusted metal or goop, and how shelters have the same exact configuration, never ever evolve or change. It has such a strangely repetitive ghost town character. They could easily target their "agile" deliverables around diversifying and breathing more life into the worlds if they could span more "sprints". Unfortuntately, the tack-ons feel hollow, empty, and often ship incredibly buggy. They used procedural modeling to create an impressive array of planets, but never modeled the planet drops with the same care and diversity.

_s_a_m_ 24d ago

i played it day 1 back then and even bought a PS4 only to play it and played it over the years repeatedly after every larger update for about 1000 hours in total. The fundamental promise they made was never shipped, which was originally a large variety of procedural flora, fauna, and planet. It is still the same uninspired boring stale core that it was day 1 with minimal extensions which produce absolutely boring world that immediately repeat. The game was always Waiting for Godot, waiting for a game that was originally announced with an interesting procedural feature but never shipped. Meanwhile I discovered the history of procedural games, which is a story of fails. I still sometimes hope that the actually rewrote the entire procedural variety system but it cant happen because people built persistent shit on those planets. They probably have to launch a new game.

dom96 24d ago

A played it, got stuck in a giant crater with seemingly no way to get out of it. That was basically the extent of my experience.

throwatdem12311 24d ago
When up against a wall you have infinite jetpack but the game doesn’t really tell you this.

Waterluvian 24d ago

I remember when it first came out, there was so much hype but I immediately wondered, “where exactly is the game loop?” I also remember how aggressively defensive fans were about it.

c7b 24d ago

I remember first hearing about NMS' concept and wishing that they would take the general idea but downsize it by at least 10 orders of magnitude. A universe with 1-100 millions of planets would still feel absolutely massive and way more than individual players would be able to exhaust, yet it would allow the creators to do a bit better curation, allow players to actually meet, maybe add more hand-crafted experiences. Basically, give up on technical purity in favor of fun.

fwip 24d ago
They added real multiplayer several years ago. If you go to the same system another player is in, they'll be there. (As well as everything anybody has ever built there).
- jrootabega 24d ago
  But you are pretty much guaranteed never to meet anyone while roaming around randomly. Only if you go to a galaxy center, the Anomaly, an expedition, or matchmake into someone else's game (is that still a thing?)
newsoftheday 23d ago
I specifically do not want hand crafted planets, it's one of the first things I look at for a space game, 1. is the planet procgen, 2. does it let me land on planets, 3. can I dig/shape the terrain (voxel). I'm aware of NMS and Empyrion - Galactic Survival. In some ways, Empyrion has better planets than NMS in my view and far fewer of them, it might be the game you're looking for.

zhainya 24d ago

This perfectly describes how this game makes me feel.

00ze 24d ago

Video games have always been part tech demo And the story aspects are played out no different than Hollywood NMS has more in common with Minecraft. It's a virtual chat room that looks Star Wars-y Also don't discount simply not being a kid anymore. Biology isn't static. Memory does not allow for that same initial burst of excitement.

m12k 24d ago

I've heard it described as "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle"

trueno 24d ago
bout 5 months ago i gave it 2 hours of my life and asked for a refund once i realized i had basically seen the whole game in that first like 30 minutes of playing. the only game that seems to hit the mark of what im actually itching for is star citizen that is in a perpetual state of never-finished but i can't even quite put a finger on what it is i'm after. beauty, art, real weather, being able to fly up through the atmosphere and just let me escape into a sci fi movie. i can acknowledge star citizen has actually come a long ways and i think they do deliver that, though i haven't played it myself just going off vids ive seen. NMS somehow feels like a visual and playable interpretation of depression to me with a Dr. Seuss world backdrop lol. Like it reminds me of times in my life where I've just been stuck in the motions, unhappy, resigning myself to the fate of doing absolutely nothing of inspiration because I felt like I had no other options and gave up. Shout outs to steam for refunding when my reason was "This game is actually depressing"

Barrin92 24d ago

>but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. to me that has become a big positive aspect of the game. The non-teleology of it, that you just run around and immersive yourself in it is pleasant in its own right. Especially modern games to me seem to have substituted games as an experience with reward system driven busy work. Everything is always instrumental. I started to notice this when games like Journey came out, or Death Stranding during the stress of the pandemic. No Man's Sky is obviously not as artistically strong as either one but the exploration only for explorations sake has me come back to it very regularly. It genuinely is a game about nothing (so is Seinfeld, never hurt the show) but to me that boredom is a genuinely good thing.

khernandezrt 24d ago

Right on the nail.

Dlemlo 24d ago

Yepp. Biggest buy misstake ever.

withinrafael 24d ago

Every time these epic announcements go out, I try co-op multiplayer again, realize it's still miserable, then close it and wait for the next release. I'd love to play it with my wife but completing our own objectives, building our own bases, not being able to directly interact like in other games this decade, progressing forward separately, fixing our own ships, etc. etc. etc. is just a non-starter. Good luck to them though!

jmyeet 24d ago

How people interact with LEGO varies. Some people like to buy specific sets and make them. That's fine. Some people see a random pile of bricks and build a massive city [1]. There are also competition events for what people can build from a random pile of bricks. There was a TV show about this too (ie Lego Masters). Some games are problem solving, others are competitive, yet others are elimination but an awful lot of games have a component that requires you to inject imagination. The Sims and even Minecraft (despite it having a survival mode too) spring to mind. That's what NMS is. Some people like to find the perfect looking ship. Others build bases to look a certain way. Others just explore. Yet others make money. If that's not for you, that's OK. But NMS can't be dismissed as being repetitive or boring. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfVCmkexl2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfVCmkexl2E

cchance 24d ago

To me it feels like what i actually want is Eve's economy, PVP/PVE strapped onto the noman gameplay, at least personaly

ghshephard 24d ago

If you are interested in the sandbox element, and space, and building - but want character - Satisfactory pulled me in for roughly 1200 hours over three years. I"ve got the scenery, and new discovery's burned in to my brain - elements of the landscape are more vivid in my memory than a lot of real places I've visited. What's interesting is that there is zero procedural generation - single world with about 20 Biome, each one with all sorts of character. Monsters are incredibly well balanced, and the sheer terror I got from the spiders (which I think are a tad OP - especially the ones that launch)_ triggered my fight-flight reflex (mostly flight) more than any other game I can recall. The game can be played in so many different ways too - you can take the factorio/big factory build out approach and speed run that, or just spend your time exploring, or, perhaps best of all - watch hundreds of hours of Youtube Videos to get a sense of the architect aesthetic that some of the top players bring to it. Epic Tech Tree. Cute back story. I consider it the greatest Sandbox/space game ever - I don't know if we'll ever see anything like it again.

protocolture 24d ago

I opened the game. Played 30 minutes. Found a start of game bug that blocks progression. Looked online, everyone claims this exact bug had been squashed years before. Started a new game. Bug returned. Left it for a few days. Bugs still there. No workaround. Raised a thread somewhere. Got yelled at for "Pretending" to have the bug. Uninstalled the game. My 2 cents is that it looked like a really shitty MMO with nothing on top, but I cant really say because it never let me leave the tutorial.

anon-3988 24d ago

Do you think the same of Minecraft?

petterroea 24d ago

When it first released I correctly predicted that the game was overhyped and destined to flop, making fun of friends who bought the game and ending up being disappointed. The internet historian video made me buy it, thinking it was maybe worth it now. I think I got like 5 hours in before feeling like I was just doing an endless grind. I felt like I had fallen for the hype, which I think was deserved ;) Maybe the game doesn't get good until you grind past the first N hours, but I just don't have the time any more.

golly_ned 24d ago

By 'coming back', do you mean actually firing it up and playing it?

mastermage 24d ago

Weird take cause the game is definetely there and it has tons of content. Admitedly it is not for me because I just do not like the way resource gathering works. Does not tickle my fancy. But saying there is nothing substantial is an odd take, there is base building, space battles (fighter and corvette), expeditions. You can even do a little automatisation if you are into it.

tnolet 24d ago

Exactly sums up my experience. Bought it day one. Still bores the hell out of me.

madrox 24d ago

I like to tinker with making games now and then, and I have learned that there are lots of game ideas I have that are more fun to make than play. A lot of those look like No Mans Sky. I feel like the devs fell in love with procedural generation and never thought about what kind of experience they want to have. I say this because I feel the same thing as you when I go back, and I really want to like it.

saidnooneever 24d ago

considering the company still exist and servers are still up I assume not everyone shares your opinion. its a pretty good milestone for an online game. not everyone enjoys the same kind of gameplay.

newsoftheday 23d ago
Indeed, https://steamdb.info/app/275850/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/275850/charts/ shows it ticked up with Cosmos but the typical average of around 10K players isn't bad.

monegator 24d ago

Same. Every time i re-download it and start a new game I never get past the tutorial because i was so incredibly bored so soon, i always wanted to like this game and i love how much effort they keep making but... sandboxes games are just so boring.

AlfeG 24d ago

Because most of the new feature are not connected to each other. Take a gravition coil. It's like in Half Life - but You can only use with very limited set of objects, that were added in same update as gravition coil. Make it useless and not fun...

rbreve 24d ago

The first 50 hours of NMS are really great but then you start to learn the patterns, even though it is a randomized/procedural, at some point it becomes predictable and boring. The other problem is that the battles are boring, they lack something and building big ships and bases feels pointless.

deleted 24d ago

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newsoftheday 23d ago

Your tastes for video games may be more aligned with another genre than a sandbox game which is what NMS is. If so, that's not a reflection of any kind on NMS.